Tech – TracePress | Every Thing From Every Wherehttp://tracepress.com
Mon, 21 Jan 2019 19:46:52 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8A host of new security enhancements is coming to iOS and macOShttp://tracepress.com/tech/a-host-of-new-security-enhancements-is-coming-to-ios-and-macos/
http://tracepress.com/tech/a-host-of-new-security-enhancements-is-coming-to-ios-and-macos/#respondTue, 05 Jun 2018 00:24:09 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48274Apple on Monday previewed a variety of security and privacy features it plans to add to macOS and iOS operating systems, including encrypted Facetime group calls, password-management tools, and camera and microphone protections. The company also released a beta version of the upcoming iOS 12 that, according to Motherboard, all but kills off two iPhone …

Apple on Monday previewed a variety of security and privacy features it plans to add to macOS and iOS operating systems, including encrypted Facetime group calls, password-management tools, and camera and microphone protections. The company also released a beta version of the upcoming iOS 12 that, according to Motherboard, all but kills off two iPhone unlocking tools used by police forces around the world.

The feature, known as USB Restricted Mode, requires that users unlock their iPhone with a password when connecting to it a USB device. Motherboard said the beta requires a password each time a phone that hasn’t been unlocked in the past hour tries to connect to a device using a Lightning connection. The password requirement largely neutralizes iPhone unlocking tools provided by companies called Cellebrite and GrayShift, which reportedly use USB connectivity to bypass iOS restrictions on the number of incorrect PIN guesses can be entered into an unlocked iPhone. With those limitations removed, police can make an unlimited number of PIN guesses when attempting to unlock a confiscated iPhone.

Previous iOS betas had USB restrictions that required the entering of a password when it hadn’t been unlocked for seven days. Those USB Restricted Modes were later removed before Apple issued final versions of iOS. The restrictions this time around are much more stringent, because police would have no one than 60 minutes between the time they obtain an iPhone and connect it to an unlocking tool. Readers should remember that Apple has previously removed USB Restricted Mode before releasing final versions and may do so again with iOS 12.

End-to-end encryption, password management, and more

The unannounced beta feature came as Apple previewed a host of security enhancements to the upcoming macOS Mojave and iOS 12. One of the most important enhancements is end-to-end encryption for group calls with the Facetime app. It works for groups of 32 or fewer people. The ability to seamlessly encrypt voice calls in real time for such a large number touched off long social media discussions as security practitioners speculated how, precisely, Apple engineers made the end-to-end encryption work.

Other enhancements include tools for generating strong passwords, storing them in the iCloud keychain, and automatically entering them into Safari and iOS apps across all of a user’s devices. Previously, standalone apps such as 1Password have done much the same thing. Now, Apple is integrating the functions directly into macOS and iOS. Apple also debuted new programming interfaces that allow users to more easily access passwords stored in third-party password managers directly from the QuickType bar. The company also announced a new feature that will flag reused passwords, an interface that autofills one-time passwords provided by authentication apps, and a mechanism for sharing passwords among nearby iOS devices, Macs, and Apple TVs.

A separate privacy enhancement is designed to prevent websites from tracking people when using Safari. It’s specifically designed to prevent share buttons and comment code on webpages from tracking people’s movements across the Web without permission or from collecting a device’s unique settings such as fonts, in an attempt to fingerprint the device.

The last additions of note are new permission dialogues macOS Mojave will display before allowing apps to access a user’s camera or microphone. The permissions are designed to thwart malicious software that surreptitiously turns on these devices in an attempt to spy on users. The new protections will largely mimic those previously available only through standalone apps such as one called Oversight, developed by security researcher Patrick Wardle. Apple said similar dialog permissions will protect the file system, mail database, message history, and backups.

Until researchers have time to thoroughly test the new features, it will be hard to say just how effective or usable they will be for average users. Still, seeing Apple devoting a fair amount of its attention this year to enhanced security and privacy is encouraging.

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/a-host-of-new-security-enhancements-is-coming-to-ios-and-macos/feed/0Everyone complaining about Microsoft buying GitHub needs to offer a better solutionhttp://tracepress.com/tech/everyone-complaining-about-microsoft-buying-github-needs-to-offer-a-better-solution/
http://tracepress.com/tech/everyone-complaining-about-microsoft-buying-github-needs-to-offer-a-better-solution/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 23:53:59 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48271Microsoft Microsoft is buying GitHub for $7.5 billion dollars, and predictably, there’s a developer backlash. GitHub, though notionally a for-profit company, has become an essential, integral part of the open-source community. GitHub offers free hosting for open-source projects and has risen to become the premiere service for collaborative, open-source development: the authoritative source repository for …

GitHub, though notionally a for-profit company, has become an essential, integral part of the open-source community. GitHub offers free hosting for open-source projects and has risen to become the premiere service for collaborative, open-source development: the authoritative source repository for many of these projects, with GitHub’s own particular pull-request-based workflow becoming a de facto standard approach for taking code contributions.

The fear is that Microsoft is hostile to open source and will do something to GitHub (though exactly what isn’t clear) to undermine the open-source projects that depend on it. Comments here at Ars, as well as on Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News, suggest not any specific concerns but a widespread lack of trust, at least among certain developers, of Microsoft’s behavior, motives, and future plans for the service.

These feelings may have been justified in the past but seem much less so today.

These projects are all hosted on GitHub, and by most accounts I’ve heard, Microsoft is doing open source in an effective, community-engaged way. Publishing source code is not the same as developing in the open; there are corporate open-source projects where all development is done privately, in-house, with few-to-no outside contributions accepted. The code is published periodically (often without the full commit history, so providing no way to see how the code was incrementally developed) with an open-source license attached. For the most part, Microsoft hasn’t used this model; instead, it uses the GitHub for authoritative repositories, with all development published to GitHub as it’s done. Microsoft welcomes outside contributions, uses GitHub’s issue tracking to publicly record bugs and feature requests, and the projects engage with their user and developer communities to prioritize new development. This is a corporation doing open source the right way.

That’s not to say that Microsoft has always been like this, and the company has expressed hostility to open source—in 2001, then-CEO Steve Ballmer said that “Linux is a cancer” because of the viral nature of its GPL license—and is often accused of trying to “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” platforms and standards that it doesn’t control, after the term was used in a 1995 company memo to describe its HTML strategy. I’m not aware of any examples in which Microsoft has actually engaged this strategy successfully—although both Microsoft and Netscape developed all manner of proprietary extensions to HTML, it was ultimately Netscape’s failure to respond to Internet Explorer 4, 5, and 6’s speed, relative stability, and superior (though still poor) standards compliance that won the browser war, not Microsoft’s extensions—but the term is still widely used by critics of the company as if it offered some explanatory power. It doesn’t.

The Microsoft of today is a company that understands and embraces open-source development, both in the strict technical sense of publishing source code and in the broader sense of community-driven, collaborative development. The movement appears to be genuine, and frankly, that’s not something that we should find altogether surprising: there’s a hell of a lot of programmers working at the company, and many of them are users or contributors of open-source software themselves. They get it; it was only a matter of time before the company did, too.

GitHub almost certainly needed buying

As a private company, we don’t know exactly what GitHub’s bank account looks like, but we can make some reasonable inferences. The company has had two rounds of venture capital funding, one for $100 million, a second for $250 million. Leaked financials from 2016 painted a picture of a company burning cash at a prodigious rate, with salary and benefits alone rivalling revenue. Even a more positive analysis of the numbers suggests that GitHub was on track to have burned through that $250 million by around the middle of this year.

GitHub is also said to have been looking for a new CEO for about a year. Taking so long to find a new CEO doesn’t necessarily mean that there was a problem: perhaps a strong candidate fell through at the last minute causing the search to be restarted or something. GitHub’s CEO search doesn’t necessarily mean that the company’s problem is entirely financial—for example, there may be lingering fallout from the sexism and harassment claims from 2014—but the search suggests that the company is struggling to find someone willing, able, and confident who can tackle these problems, and money issues have to rank among the concerns of the CEO of an unprofitable company.

If money problems were indeed looming, GitHub had only a few solid options. Its backers could, of course, have decided to cut their losses and let the company fold. The effect of this on the open-source world would be devastating, and it’s hard to imagine that any prospective buyer could ever do more harm than this would cause. If the desire was to keep the company as a going concern, that meant raising more money. That presents three options: another round of VC funding, an IPO, and a sale.

Both an IPO and another round of venture capital cash would share a similar problem: any putative investors will look at the books, and if the books are an endless sea of red ink with no profitability in sight, those investors might be scared off. Existing backers with doubts about the business might have wanted out, pushing things toward an IPO or sale rather than another funding round. IPOs take time, and that may have been a luxury GitHub didn’t have.

GitHub makes its money from enterprise customers, with both a service for private cloud-hosted repositories and an on-premises version of the GitHub software stack. To turn a profit, the company needs more enterprise customers, and it needs to acquire them at lower cost.

In contrast to a funding round or an IPO, a sale to another company changes the parameters somewhat: it can make the path to profitability that much shorter. A cash infusion doesn’t offer any direct access to these enterprise customers that GitHub needs. Selling to, say, Microsoft, or Amazon, or Google, would open up access to those companies’ existing reach into enterprise markets. GitHub would no longer be solely responsible for building its sales channels: it could take advantage of ones that its new owner already has. This greater reach can boost revenue much faster than a mere lump of cash ever could.

Being bought also opens the door to certain synergies, which is to say, job losses; while we wouldn’t expect any immediate changes, it wouldn’t be tremendously surprising to see HR, sales, and marketing get the axe sooner or later as they get subsumed into Microsoft. As with enterprise sales channels, this is something that merely taking cash can’t do.

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/everyone-complaining-about-microsoft-buying-github-needs-to-offer-a-better-solution/feed/0Flight-sim maker threatens legal action over Reddit posts discussing DRMhttp://tracepress.com/tech/flight-sim-maker-threatens-legal-action-over-reddit-posts-discussing-drm/
http://tracepress.com/tech/flight-sim-maker-threatens-legal-action-over-reddit-posts-discussing-drm/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 22:37:51 +0000https://tracepress.com/?p=48268The last time FlightSimLabs made news outside of the insular community of high-end flight simulator fans, it was for some invasive password-extractor malware included with a recent add-on package as an ostensible “anti-piracy” measure. Today, the company is again making waves for what many see as overzealous legal threats in response to legitimate discussion of …

Today’s controversy begins with a Reddit thread that noted FlightSimLabs’ A320 add-on installing “cmdhost.exe” files in the “system32” and “SysWOW64” folders inside the Windows directory. The strange filename and location—which seems designed to closely match those of actual Windows system files—made some Reddit users suspicious, especially given FlightSimLabs history of undisclosed installations.

Legal threats always lessen attention, right?

The “controversy” over these files might well have died down after that response. But then FlightSimLabs’ Simon Kelsey sent a message to the moderators of the flightsim subreddit, gently reminding them of “Reddit’s obligation as a publisher… to ensure that any libelous content is taken down as soon as you become aware of it.”

While ostensibly welcoming “robust fair comment and opinion,” the message also warns that “ANY suggestion that our current or future products pose any threat to users is absolutely false and libelous.” That warning extends to the company’s previous password-extractor controversy, with Kelsey writing “ANY suggestion that any user’s data was compromised during the events of February is entirely false and therefore libelous.”

“I would hate for lawyers to have to get involved in this, and I trust that you will take appropriate steps to ensure that no such libel is posted,” Kelsey concludes. A follow-up message from Kelsey reiterated the same points and noted that FlightSimLabs has reported specific comments and demanded they be removed as libelous.

The moderators in question show no sign of giving in to FlightSimLabs’ demands. In an open letter to the company and the community, the moderators say that “removing content you disagree with is simply not within our purview,” and they called out FlightSimLabs for “attempted censorship on our subreddit.”

Threats of legal action, the moderators argue, “generate a feeling that it is unsafe for people to express their opinions or participate in discussion that is critical of your company.” The moderators also cite defenses including “truth, opinion, and public interest of general information” as potentially protecting the posts in question from a legal definition of libel.

Furthermore, the moderators say FlightSimLabs has been abusing the report system and possibly manipulating post voting with new sockpuppet accounts. FlightSimLabs founder Lefteris Kalamaras denied those accusations, saying the company has “never directed any individuals to create Reddit accounts, let alone for the purposes of vote manipulation or abuse of the Reddit post reporting system.”

Digging in and backing off

Initially, FlightSimLabs didn’t seem to budge from its position. In a lengthy reply post on Reddit, Kelsey argues that the company is not looking for wholesale “censorship” of the entire thread and only wants “very specific posts which contained clearly defamatory claims removed.” While understanding that “accountability is a difficult thing to deal with in an anonymized social media culture,” Kelsey argues that “we are and should be accountable for what we post.”

“If you’re confident that you could prove in a court of law that what you say is grounded in truth—say it,” he writes. “If you’re not confident of that, then perhaps ask yourself the question why you are posting it at all.”

While acknowledging that at least one of his messages to Reddit moderators could be considered “aggressive,” Kelsey also notes that “I see plenty of aggression here, too.” And while Redditors sharing opinions or honestly held beliefs about the FlightSimLabs situation is fine, Kelsey argues the mods are “permitting some clearly ungrounded and libellous [sic] comments to be made, [and] they are actually unwittingly facilitating the spread of misinformation and (much as I hate the term) ‘fake news’.”

All that said, Kalamaras told Ars Technica in response to a request for comment that “Kelsey spoke out of turn when using the words ‘legal action'” in his response. “There was never any intention to seek action against Reddit… We understand now that the moderators regarded our emails as a threat to them, but that was not and could never be our intention obviously… We’re very unhappy that Simon’s emails to Reddit were taken in the wrong context, as his efforts were always to protect our company image and that didn’t go as planned.”

“The point we were always trying to make (and will continue to do so) is that we always welcome freedom of speech (even by people who choose to remain anonymous for their own purposes) and all forms of criticism,” Kalamaras continued. “But we have to be able to protect ourselves against defamatory comments whose purpose is clearly to misguide potential customers and hurt our company.”

Kalamaras tells Ars that Kelsey was merely trying to bring specific, defamatory comments to the moderators’ attention through the site’s reporting system and that only four of the 30 comments posted to the thread at the time were ones the company considers “libelous.” Those comments, he says, were “designed to misguide and misdirect current and prospective customers into believing there was something [illicit] behind our product license activation mechanism, by spreading lies and misinformation.”

Whether legal threats are necessary or not, Kalamaras said he feels “there should be some way companies in our situation should be able to get assistance from Reddit when anonymous individuals hide behind this anonymity and go unchecked. We hope that, next time, we can work with the moderators together, in the spirit that they will provide this assistance to us.”

Disclaimer: Ars and Reddit are both owned by the same parent organization, Advance Publications

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/flight-sim-maker-threatens-legal-action-over-reddit-posts-discussing-drm/feed/0The best features of Apple’s new softwarehttp://tracepress.com/tech/the-best-features-of-apples-new-software/
http://tracepress.com/tech/the-best-features-of-apples-new-software/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 20:17:34 +0000https://tracepress.com/?p=48259Apple is adding a collection of features designed to stop people getting addicted to their devices. It has created a Do Not Disturb setting which is triggered at bedtime, and will make sure that there’s “nothing to get you spun up” executive Craig Federighi said. You tap when you want to get your notifications back.Â …

Apple is adding a collection of features designed to stop people getting addicted to their devices. It has created a Do Not Disturb setting which is triggered at bedtime, and will make sure that there’s “nothing to get you spun up” executive Craig Federighi said. You tap when you want to get your notifications back.Â

Apple isÂ also going to start grouping notifications together so that customers aren’t overwhelmed with lots of…

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/the-best-features-of-apples-new-software/feed/0Apple will tell iPhone and iPad users if they are spending too long on their phonehttp://tracepress.com/tech/apple-will-tell-iphone-and-ipad-users-if-they-are-spending-too-long-on-their-phone/
http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-will-tell-iphone-and-ipad-users-if-they-are-spending-too-long-on-their-phone/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 20:02:54 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48256Apple has responded to fierce criticism that its products are harming childrenâs mental health by announcing a range of apps that limit time spent on iPhones and allow parents to set device “allowances”. The new tools,Â announced during the companyâs Worldwide Developerâs Conference (WWDC) warn iPhone and iPad users if they are spending too long on …

Apple has responded to fierce criticism that its products are harming childrenâs mental health by announcing a range of apps that limit time spent on iPhones and allow parents to set device “allowances”.

]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-will-tell-iphone-and-ipad-users-if-they-are-spending-too-long-on-their-phone/feed/0Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire review: Oh, the places you’ll plunderhttp://tracepress.com/tech/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-review-oh-the-places-youll-plunder/
http://tracepress.com/tech/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-review-oh-the-places-youll-plunder/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 19:32:35 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48247Enlarge / Deadfire‘s presentation feels improved in nearly every way over its predecessor. My sword really likes being stabbed into people. I know this because she (he? it?) told me so. Her name is Modwyr, and she only stops insulting me when the conversation turns toward potential violence. It’s making me uncomfortable, but the bonus …

Enlarge/Deadfire‘s presentation feels improved in nearly every way over its predecessor.

My sword really likes being stabbed into people. I know this because she (he? it?) told me so. Her name is Modwyr, and she only stops insulting me when the conversation turns toward potential violence. It’s making me uncomfortable, but the bonus stats I get for keeping Modwyr around are too juicy to pass up. I’ve got a god to kill, after all. At least I think I do.

There is no shortage of choices to make in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. The pirate-centric sequel to developer Obsidian’s throwback RPG doesn’t skimp on that facet of the pen-and-paper role-playing game it replicates. Some of my choices from the previous game have already come back to haunt me, thanks to an imported save, though newcomers have the option to write their own history near the beginning of Deadfire.

The god of entropy is pissed. He’s not the one I’m hunting as part of Deadfire’s main story, but I lied to him in the first PoE. Now he’s promising a showdown.

I’ll get to that eventually. For the time being, though, I’ve got pirates to hunt, my own crew to manage, several imperialist governments to support or betray, and a talking sword to placate. It’s a lot of intrigue to disentangle—with consequences rearing their ugly heads immediately after doing so. But my player-character is the perfect psychic, soul-reading, pirate lord for the job.

There is an enormous amount of lore and activities to absorb. Luckily, Deadfire does a much better job of presenting it all than the first PoE. Its top-down perspective is complemented with bigger, more detailed 3D models for party members. Now I know just what my chain-smoking tank of a farm hand (who then became mayor) is meant to look like. Every line of dialogue (besides your player-character’s) is fully voiced and with pretty good acting most of the time. So that same tank’s attempts to communicate with a bird land with firm comedic timing.

Maybe the voice acting is why Deadfire’s writing seems sharper than the original’s. Maybe it’s just because the plot is less dour. The previous game centered on a plague of children born without souls in the wake of a bloody crusade. Deadfire has me sailing for buried treasure so I can pay to track down a god possessing a hundred-foot statue.

There are still serious, even grisly moments along the way. I didn’t relish learning about a disease that drowns its victims in their own fluids or how the impoverished and diseased are killed rather than cured in one of the game’s major cities. But there’s a distinct sense of adventure this time around, compared to PoE’s grim journey.

Revamped combat

That energy even applies to Deadfire’s revamped combat, even though it’s not especially different from the first game. You command wizards and rogues in real time from an isometric perspective. Naturally different classes have different abilities, but the restrictions on those skills are spread evenly across characters. Priests can only cast a couple of spells of the same level per battle, for instance, but they get those casts back at the end of every encounter (instead of only when the party rests, as in the original). Roles centered less around spells are less restricted but typically offer less variety.

Ship-to-ship combat is a dull point in an otherwise shining RPG.

My player character is dead and that’s a lot of fire.

That’s not a happy looking god.

Character progression comes fast and furious—with tons of options for combat and subterfuge.

Combat plays out in real time, with the ability to pause.

Junk loot builds up over time, just like in the last game, but feels like well-earned plunder more than a hassle.

Dungeons are full of secrets and loot. Also lots of monsters.

Out-of-combat skills can be used to sneak, talk, and force your past obstacles non-violently.

The game takes place in an archipelago full of island nations to explore.

This sword is a jerk.

Huge monsters put Deadfire’s more balanced combat to the test.

Chanters and Ciphers are bigger outliers than ever. The former class (your basic bard stand-in) generates the equivalent of mana by belting out passive buffs and debuffs. These useful actions reward Chanters with effectively unlimited spell casts that can paralyze foes or summon baby dragons to fight. It’s powerful stuff. Similarly, Ciphers (PoE’s word for psychics) do bonus damage with every basic attack. When they do, they generate MP for abilities that disorient, dominate, and explode enemies.

The trade-off is that both classes take time to warm up, although that doesn’t feel like much of a detriment most of the time. As massive as it is, Deadfire progresses at a pretty steady clip. I unlocked game-changing skills (like greater base MP at the start of every fight for my own custom-made Cipher) within the first few hours. Leveling up also offers points to spend on out-of-combat skills, like diplomacy. And points from every party member typically count toward checks for such skills. So I felt indomitably charismatic, stealthy, intimidating, athletic, and erudite almost as soon as I felt invincible.

Tropical pirate morals

You can set Deadfire’s difficulty to scale with you, which is good for generating that role-playing drama that comes out of rolling with your failures. I usually found the writing rich enough even without that added risk, though.

The setting would be a fascinating place even without Pillars of Eternity’s background story of gods and politics. There simply aren’t enough pirate games for my money (though that drought is slowly ending). But the tropical setting provides a good backdrop for the cultural intrigue. The Deadfire archipelago’s disparate tribes have begun selling the land piecemeal to foreign colonizers—including a branch of their own culture.

That offshoot nation traded farmland for huge amounts of saltpeter. Now, naturally, the people with the gunpowder want “their” home back. That moral backstory made it ever-so-slightly harder for me to select dialogue options; I couldn’t fall back on quite the same ethical arguments as if I was dealing with unrelated, invading imperialists.

Deadfire doesn’t have a black-and-white morality meter for these decisions. Instead, it has reputation scales for different characters and groups. Your player character gets to be known as kind or ruthless—a friend to the pirate nation here or a foe to that cult there.

Rep can come back to haunt you at unexpected times. It further fills the need for surprise tension. I winced more than once at losing favor with the sharpshooting spy in my party I wanted to court. I’ve also gotten compliments on my ruthlessness, though. So that’s nice.

Looting for fun and profit

In-game choice only feels seriously under-cooked during ship-to-ship combat—another new addition to Deadfire. The battles play out entirely in turns, on a mostly featureless menu. Unlike in standard combat, there’s nothing to indicate your odds of a successful hit, so it’s tough to gauge which of your few options is best. After wildly sailing circles around a couple sloops, I gave up on the sea battles altogether, boarding weaker hostiles and fleeing from the rest.

That was a profitable decision. Deadfire has mostly solved its predecessor’s problem of too much junk loot by leaning fully into it. Now, all the mid-grade gear you collect from captured ships is just plunder to sell at the next port. It’s a much more active, satisfying system than passively accruing cash at a keep (i.e., what happened in the first game). Still, I’d appreciate a “sell all junk below a certain rarity” button.

The cash you accrue from selling useless sabers and chain mail can go towards equipment with unique traits, better ship parts, and hiring people to teach you skills. It’s a nice little loop to complement your party’s ever-growing strength. Taking this power fantasy from island to island and checking off side quests might be monotonous in another game. But Pillars of Eternity 2 justifies it with endless charm to chuckle at and machinations to unravel.

I don’t just want to explore a zombie-infested undercity. I want to know what my obsessively clean wizard friend has to say about its stink. I want to know what’s killing the prisoners sent there to be executed. I want to use it to sneak into the black market, where I can buy food for a slum’s starving labor class.

Every inch of Deadfire is filled with those kinds of surprises—stitched together by more balanced combat than its predecessor. Sometimes you battle gods. Sometimes you find a talking sword with a possible murder fetish. You won’t know which until you sail to that next point on the map.

The Good

More balanced real-time combat than Pillars of Eternity

Fascinating depth and detail to the world

Reputation and dice rolls add unexpected drama

Incredible amount of well-constructed side content

Full voice acting (usually) adds charm

The Bad

Ship-to-ship combat is a letdown

Less-macabre main plot isn’t quite as memorable

The Ugly

There’s a lot of back story to take in if you didn’t play the first game.

The Verdict: Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is a broad, deep, and excellent RPG in the tradition of Baldur’s Gate. And it has pirates. Buy it.

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-review-oh-the-places-youll-plunder/feed/0How to protect yourself from megabreaches like the one that hit Ticketflyhttp://tracepress.com/tech/how-to-protect-yourself-from-megabreaches-like-the-one-that-hit-ticketfly/
http://tracepress.com/tech/how-to-protect-yourself-from-megabreaches-like-the-one-that-hit-ticketfly/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 19:15:49 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48242A recent hack of ticket-distribution website Ticketfly exposed more than 26 million email addresses, along with home addresses, phone numbers, and first and last names, according to the Have I Been Pwned breach notification service. The intrusion provides the latest reminder that users should provide incorrect or incomplete information to online services whenever possible. More …

A recent hack of ticket-distribution website Ticketfly exposed more than 26 million email addresses, along with home addresses, phone numbers, and first and last names, according to the Have I Been Pwned breach notification service. The intrusion provides the latest reminder that users should provide incorrect or incomplete information to online services whenever possible. More about that later.

The breach was first reported last week by Motherboard, which said the breach was carried out by a hacker who had first offered to provide Ticketfly officials with details of the underlying vulnerability in exchange for one bitcoin, worth roughly $7,500. When the officials didn’t respond, the hacker defaced the site and published the user data online, Motherboard said.

Have I Been Pwned said over the weekend that the data included 26.1 million unique email addresses, names, physical addresses, and phone numbers. It didn’t include password or credit card data. In a blog post, Ticketfly officials said they were in the process of bringing the ticket service back online. Part of that effort involves working with forensic and security experts to investigate the hack and to better secure the new site against similar intrusions.

“We’re rolling out a secure website solution as an alternative to your Ticketfly-powered site to meet your immediate needs,” the post said. “We’ve built a secure, non-WordPress-based website solution with your existing domain, and your site will appear sometime today. We’ll be actively updating your site so that your events will populate and external ticketing links will work. There’s no action for you to take, and we’ll keep you informed as our longer-term website strategy evolves.”

The Ticketfly breach is a good reminder that people should avoid providing services with personal information whenever possible. Ticketfly requires that users provide a full name, billing address, and phone number when using a credit card to buy tickets. But like many services, Ticketfly didn’t check the validity or completeness of most of the information supplied. That made it possible for people to give incomplete addresses and names and list non-existent phone numbers such as 555-1212 and still order tickets.

Some sites are more lenient with incomplete or incorrect information than others. A surprising number of sites will accept completely fictitious addresses such as 123 Any Street. Others will accept a small portion of a correct billing address such as the number portion and the first three or four letters of the street name. Users typically must experiment when using a new site or service to see how much incorrect or incomplete details it will accept.

People should also consider using a separate email address for services they don’t particularly trust to prevent more sensitive email addresses from becoming widely known. Another measure users of Gmail and some other services can take is to append a unique string containing a plus sign and a domain to an existing email address. For instance: dan.goodin+ticketfly.com@arstechnica.com, dan.goodin+amazon.com@arstechnica.com, and so on. It’s never a bad idea to sign up with Have I Been Pwned to get a notification when one of your email addresses has been exposed.

Although the Ticketfly breach didn’t expose password data, many other breaches do, and in many cases weak protections make it trivial for hackers to obtain the underlying plain text. Users should always use a long, randomly generated password that’s unique for each site. Password managers are one of the easiest ways to accomplish this.

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/how-to-protect-yourself-from-megabreaches-like-the-one-that-hit-ticketfly/feed/0Apple announces macOS 10.14, codenamed “Mojave”http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-announces-macos-10-14-codenamed-mojave/
http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-announces-macos-10-14-codenamed-mojave/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 19:00:17 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48236SAN JOSE—Apple detailed its next major operating system update at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today: macOS 10.14, which the company has named “Mojave,” sticking with its California-based naming convention. Tim Cook told the audience that MacOS included a lot of new features for both everyday and pro users, and Craig Federighi kicked off the …

SAN JOSE—Apple detailed its next major operating system update at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today: macOS 10.14, which the company has named “Mojave,” sticking with its California-based naming convention. Tim Cook told the audience that MacOS included a lot of new features for both everyday and pro users, and Craig Federighi kicked off the demo with something that will likely be near and dear to many Ars readers’ hearts: dark mode.

Night-owls and others who prefer a light-on-dark appearance can now take advantage of an official dark theme for the entire OS. Previously macOS allowed turning the menubar and dock dark, but this new preference appears to apply more extensively throughout the operating system. The new dark system theme matches well with a matching one for XCode, enabling developers to bathe their development environment in cooler dark colors.

Desktop help

Federighi showed off a live desktop wallpaper updating function that changes your wallpaper throughout the day, but far more interesting was the “desktop stacks” feature, which allows you to organize icons on the desktop into piles, rather than having them spread across the entire desktop willy-nilly. On activating the option, files on your desktop are auto-arranged into stacks based on selectable criteria, such as document kind, date, or by tag.

Fix the fine Finder

Everybody’s favorite punching bag, the Finder, will be receiving some improvements. Federighi showed off a new “Gallery” view mode, which allows a single selected file to dominate the entire Finder window. Documents displayed this way can also have their metadata displayed in a sidebar rather than having to call up a separate Info window.

Gallery view with sidebar.

New sidebar with quick actions.

The new informative sidebar shows up in other views, as well, and includes a “quick actions” toolbar at bottom that will display contextually appropriate options for the file being displayed. Additionally, users can add custom actions (like Automator scripts) to the sidebar.

This story is developing and will be updated throughout the morning.

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-announces-macos-10-14-codenamed-mojave/feed/0Apple TV 4K to receive Dolby Atmos supporthttp://tracepress.com/tech/apple-tv-4k-to-receive-dolby-atmos-support/
http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-tv-4k-to-receive-dolby-atmos-support/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 18:44:06 +0000http://tracepress.com/?p=48230Valentina Palladino SAN JOSE—Apple announced tvOS updates on the WWDC stage, though the company didn’t confirm whether these features amount to a whole new version number. No huge changes mark the latest version of tvOS, but Apple did include support for Dolby Atmos surround sound, a feature that many pointed out as a missed opportunity …

SAN JOSE—Apple announced tvOS updates on the WWDC stage, though the company didn’t confirm whether these features amount to a whole new version number. No huge changes mark the latest version of tvOS, but Apple did include support for Dolby Atmos surround sound, a feature that many pointed out as a missed opportunity in the Apple TV 4K.

The Apple TV 4K came out at the end of last year, and it represented a pretty big update to the streaming device since competitors like Roku added 4K support to their devices already. While it supported Dolby Vision HDR, the device did not support Dolby Atmos surround sound at launch. Apple’s next tvOS update will bring that feature to its set-top boxes, essentially allowing streamed content to produce richer sound experiences than they did before.

Existing iTunes purchases will receive Atmos sound channel upgrades for free, Apple confirmed during the WWDC keynote. The company did not confirm whether similar support will come to older Apple TV devices.

After announcing support for new carriers around the world, particularly American cable operator Charter Spectrum, Apple announced a new “zero sign-on” feature for those subscribers. “If you’re on your TV provider’s broadband network, we’ll securely and automatically unlock all the supported apps with the TV app,” Apple TV lead designer Jen Folse said on the WWDC stage. “No sign-on required, it just works.”

Creston, Savant, and Control4 home control systems will receive updates that allow interoperability with Apple TV devices, Folse told the crowd. She also described a new feature that allows users to look up more information about Apple TV screensaver images (“aerials”) by simply tapping the Apple TV Siri remote. Apple’s newest aerials, as shown on the WWDC stage, looked particularly handsome.

During the tvOS presentation, Apple chose not to mention its streaming ambitions for the future. The company has been investing a lot of time and money into original content, and it’s planning to debut an OTT service of its own soon (likely in early 2019) to compete with the likes of Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube. Projects currently known to be in the works are an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, and a morning-show drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.

No date was announced for exactly when to expect these updates.

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]]>http://tracepress.com/tech/apple-tv-4k-to-receive-dolby-atmos-support/feed/0watchOS 5 debuts with health and fitness tweakshttp://tracepress.com/tech/watchos-5-debuts-with-health-and-fitness-tweaks/
http://tracepress.com/tech/watchos-5-debuts-with-health-and-fitness-tweaks/#respondMon, 04 Jun 2018 18:29:28 +0000https://tracepress.com/?p=48221Apple is announcing watchOS 5, a major update to its smartwatch platform. There’s a big focus on new fitness and health features. You can now challenge any of your friends to an exercise competition, which will compare your tracking stats to your friends. The winner will get an award to add to their collection, kind of …

Apple is announcing watchOS 5, a major update to its smartwatch platform.

There’s a big focus on new fitness and health features. You can now challenge any of your friends to an exercise competition, which will compare your tracking stats to your friends. The winner will get an award to add to their collection, kind of like real life achievement system. There are also new workout types like yoga and hiking. Outdoor running can now track your rolling mile pace, and will alert you if you’re falling behind your desired pace. If you forget to start workout detection at the beginning of your workout, watchOS’ new automatic workout detection can retroactively credit you with workout time. It can also give you a heads up if you forget to stop the activity tracking.

For communication, there’s a new “Walkie Talkie” mode, which basically like the old-school push-to-talk functionality from old cell phones, but on a watch. Pick which friend you want to talk to, and if they approve the one-time Walkie Talkie permission, you’ll be able to do instant voice communication.

WWDC is happening right now, as we’ll be updating this post live as more details are announced.

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